At Alang, in India, on a six-mile stretch of oily,
smoky beach, 40,000 men tear apart half of the world's discarded
ships, each one a sump of toxic waste. Environmentalists in the West
are outraged. The shipbreakers, of course, want to be left alone --
and maybe they should be.

SHIP Captain Vivek A.
Pandey thought he could have been a fighter pilot. Because his father
had flown for the British before Indian independence, Pandey felt he
had flying in his blood. When he was a young man, he took the Indian
Pilot's Aptitude Test and astonished the examiners with his spatial
orientation, his instinct for flight instruments, and the sureness of
his reactions. They saw what he already knew -- that he was born with
the cool. So when he then went to sea, he was not running away but
making a choice. He explained it to me with a rhyme, "from aviation to
navigation," as if the two were nearly the same. For seventeen years
afterward Pandey ploughed the oceans in cargo ships and tankers, under
many flags. He became a captain and lived aboard his vessels in
master's quarters, some of which seemed to him as luxurious as hotel
suites. He visited Norfolk, Savannah, Long Beach, and all the big
ports of Europe. He liked the tidiness and power of a ship's command,
but eventually he got married and felt the pull of domesticity. And
so, nine years ago, after the birth of a daughter, he settled in the
state of Gujarat, on India's far-western shore.

I found him there last
winter, in the black hours before dawn, on a beach called Alang -- a
shoreline strewn with industrial debris on the oily Gulf of Cambay,
part of the Arabian Sea. I'd been warned that Pandey would resent my
presence and see me as a meddlesome Westerner. But he gave no sign of
that now. He was a sturdy, middle-aged merchant captain wearing clean
khakis, sneakers, and a baseball cap. Outwardly he was a calm,
businesslike mariner with a job to do. He stood among a group of
diffident, rougher-looking men, some in traditional lungis and
turbans, and accepted offers to share their coconut meat and tea. He
checked his watch. He looked out across the dark sea.

A high tide had raised
the ocean's level by thirty feet, bringing the waterline a quarter
mile inland and nearly to the top of the beach. In the blackness
offshore two ships lay at anchor, visible only by their masthead
lights. The first was a 515-foot general-cargo vessel named the
Pioneer 1, which hailed from St. Vincent, in the Caribbean. Pandey
raised a two-way radio to his lips and, calling himself "Alang
Control," said, "Okay, Pioneer One, heave up your anchor, heave up
your anchor."

The Pioneer's captain
acknowledged the order in thickly accented English. "Roger. Heave up
anchor."

To me Pandey said, "We'll
start off." He radioed the ship to turn away from the coast and gather
speed. "You make one-six-zero degrees, full ahead. What is your
distance from the ship behind you?"

"Six cables, six cables."

"Okay, you make course
one-six-zero, full ahead."

The masthead lights began
to creep through the night. When the captain reported that the ship
was steady on the outbound course, Pandey ordered hard starboard
rudder. He said, "Let me know your course every ten degrees."

The answer came back
shortly: "One-seven-zero, Pioneer One." The turn was under way.

"One-eight-zero, Pioneer
One." I had to imagine, because I could not see, that great mass of
steel trembling under power and swinging toward the shore in the hands
of its crew. The captain called the changing courses with tension in
his voice. I got the impression he had not done this before. But
Pandey was nonchalant. He gazed at silhouettes of sheds that were at
the top of the beach. He sipped his tea. The radio said,

"One-nine-zero ...
two-zero-zero ... two-one-zero."

Pandey began talking
about the Pilot's Aptitude Test that he had taken years before. He
said, "It's a test for which you can appear only once in your
lifetime. Either you have the aptitude to be a pilot or you don't, so
it is a one-time course in a lifetime. And very interesting ..."

"Two-two-zero."

On that test, using
mechanical controls, Pandey had kept a dot within the confines of a
1.5-inch moving square. Now, using a hand-held radio, he was going to
ram the Pioneer, a ship with a beam of seventy-five feet, into a plot
on the beach merely ninety-eight feet wide. It was presumptuous of
him, and he knew it. I admired his cool. The lights of the ship grew
closer. The radio said, "Two-three-zero." Pandey said, "Okay, Captain,
you are ballasting, no?"

"Yes, sir, we are
ballasting. Ballasting is going on."

"Very good, please
continue."

The numbers counted up.
At "three-one-zero," with the Pioneer now close offshore, Pandey
finally showed some emotion. Raising his voice, he said, "Okay, make
three-two-zero, steady her. Okay, now you give maximum revolution,
Captain! Give maximum revolution!"

I went down to the
water's edge. The Pioneer came looming out of the darkness, thrashing
the ocean's surface with its single screw, raising a large white bow
wake as it rushed toward the beach. I could make out the figures of
men peering forward from the bridge and the bow. Now the sound of the
bow wave, like that of a waterfall, drowned the drumming of the
engine. A group of workers who had been standing nearby scattered to
safety. I stayed where I was. Pandey joined me. The Pioneer kept
coming. It was caught by an inshore current that carried it briefly to
the side. Then the keel hit the bottom, and the ship drove hard onto
the flooded beach, carried by its weight, slowing under full forward
power until the rudder no longer functioned and the hull veered out of
control and slid to a halt not a hundred yards from where we stood.
Anchors the size of cars rattled down the sides and splashed into the
shallows. The engine stopped, the lights switched off in succession
from bow to stern, and abruptly the Pioneer lay dark and still.

I know that a ship is an
inanimate object, but I cannot deny that at that moment the Pioneer
did die. It had been built in Japan in 1971, and had wandered the
world under various owners and names -- Cosmos Altair, Zephyrus,
Bangkok Navee, Normar Pioneer. And now, as I stood watching from the
beach, it became a ferrous corpse -- in Indian law as well as in
practice no longer a ship but just a mass of imported steel. The
seamen who lingered aboard, probing the dead passageways with their
flashlight beams, were waiting for the tide to go out, so that they
could lower a rope ladder, climb down the side, and walk away on dry
ground. The new owner would have his workers start cutting the corpse
in the morning.

I asked Pandey if he
found this sad, and he answered emphatically that he did not. He was a
powerful state official in a nation of powerful officials: he was the
port officer of Alang, a man who rode in a chauffeured car with a
state emblem on the hood, and it was important to him to appear
rational at all times. But the truth, I thought later, might even be
that he enjoyed these ship killings. He told me that during his tenure
he had personally directed every one -- altogether several thousand by
now -- and he took me along to his next victim, a small cargo vessel
also from the Caribbean, which he had already sent speeding toward its
destruction. He was proud of his efficiency. He mentioned a personal
record of seven ships in succession. He was Pandey the ace, a champion
executioner.

Then dawn spread across
his gargantuan landscape -- Alang, in daylight barely recognizable as
a beach, a narrow, smoke-choked industrial zone six miles long, where
nearly 200 ships stood side by side in progressive stages of
dissection, yawning open to expose their cavernous holds, spilling
their black innards onto the tidal flats, and submitting to the hands
of 40,000 impoverished Indian workers. A narrow, roughly paved
frontage road ran along the top of the beach, parallel to the ocean.
It was still quiet at dawn, although a few battered trucks had arrived
early, and were positioning themselves now for the day's first loads
of steel scrap. On the ocean side the frontage road was lined by the
metal fences that defined the upper boundaries of the 183 shipbreaking
yards at Alang. The fences joined together into an irregular
scrap-metal wall that ran intermittently for most of the beach, and
above which the bows of ships rose in succession like giants emerging
from the sea. Night watchmen were swinging the yard gates open now,
revealing the individual plots, each demarcated by little flags or
other markers stuck into the sand, and heavily cluttered with cut
metal and nautical debris. The yards looked nearly the same, except
for their little offices, usually just inside the gates. The most
marginal yards could afford only flimsy shacks or open-sided shelters.
The more successful yards had invested in more solid structures, some
of concrete, with raised verandahs and overhead fans.

The workers lived just
across the frontage road, in a narrow shantytown with no sanitation,
and for the most part with no power. The shantytown did not have a
name of its own. It stretched for several miles through the middle of
Alang, and had a small central business section, with a few small
grocery stalls and stand-up cafés. It was dusty, tough, and crowded.
Unemployment there was high. The residents were almost exclusively
men, migrants from the distant states of Orissa and Uttar Pradesh.
They toiled under shipyard supervisors, typically from their home
states or villages, who dispensed the jobs, generally in return for a
cut from the workers' already meager pay. The workers chose to work
nonetheless, because the alternatives were worse. In the morning light
now, they emerged from their shacks by the thousands and moved across
the frontage road like an army of the poor. They trudged through the
yards' open gates, donned hard hats, picked up crowbars and
sledgehammers, and lit crude cutting torches. By eight o'clock, the
official start of the workday, they had sparks showering from all the
ships nearby, and new black smoke rising into the distance along the
shore.

ALANG is a wonder of the
world. It may be a necessity, too. When ships grow old and expensive
to run, after about twenty-five years of use, their owners do not pay
to dispose of them but, rather, the opposite -- they sell them on the
international scrap market, where a typical vessel like the Pioneer
may bring a million dollars for the weight of its steel. Selling old
ships for scrap is considered to be a basic financial requirement by
the shipping industry -- a business that has long suffered from small
profits and cutthroat competition. No one denies that what happens
afterward is a dangerous and polluting process.

Shipbreaking was
performed with cranes and heavy equipment at salvage docks by the big
shipyards of the United States and Europe until the 1970s, when labor
costs and environmental regulations drove most of the business to the
docksides of Korea and Taiwan. Eventually, however, even these
entrepreneurial countries started losing interest in the business and
gradually decided they had better uses for their shipyards. This meant
that the world's shipbreaking business was again up for grabs. In the
1980s enterprising businessmen in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan
seized the initiative with a simple, transforming idea: to break a
ship they did not need expensive docks and tools; they could just
wreck the thing -- drive the ship up onto a beach as they might a
fishing boat, and tear it apart by hand. The scrap metal to be had
from such an operation could be profitably sold, because of the
growing need in South Asia for low-grade steel, primarily in the form
of ribbed reinforcing rods (re-bars) to be used in the construction of
concrete walls. These rods, which are generally of a poor quality,
could be locally produced from the ships' hull plating by small-scale
"re-rolling mills," of which there were soon perhaps a hundred in the
vicinity of Alang alone. From start to finish the chain of
transactions depended on the extent of the poverty in South Asia.
There was a vast and fast-growing population of people living close to
starvation, who would work hard for a dollar or two a day, keep the
unions out, and accept injuries and deaths without complaint. Neither
they nor the government authorities would dream of making an issue of
labor or environmental conditions.

The South Asian industry
took about a decade to mature. In 1983 Gujarat State proclaimed Alang
its shipbreaking site, when it was still a pristine shore known only
to a few fishermen, without even a dirt road leading to it. Twenty-two
shipbreakers leased plots and disposed of five small ships that year.
The following year they disposed of fifty-one. The boom began in the
early 1990s, as the richer countries of East Asia continued to
withdraw from the business.

Today roughly 90 percent
of the world's annual crop of 700 condemned ships now end their lives
on the beaches of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh -- and fully half of
them die at Alang. With few exceptions, the breakers are not high-born
or educated men. They are shrewd traders who have fought their way up,
and in some cases have grown rich, but have never lost the poor man's
feeling of vulnerability. They have good reason to feel insecure. Even
with the most modest of labor costs, shipbreaking is a marginal
business that uses borrowed money and generates slim profits. The risk
of failure for even the most experienced breakers is real. Some go
under every year. For their workers the risks are worse: falls, fires,
explosions, and exposure to a variety of poisons from fuel oil,
lubricants, paints, wiring, insulation, and cargo slop. Many workers
are killed every year. Nonetheless, by local standards the industry
has been a success. Even the lowliest laborers are proud of what they
do at Alang. There is no ship too big to be torn apart this way. More
important, the economic effects are substantial -- Alang and the
industries that have sprung from it provide a livelihood, however
meager, for perhaps as many as a million Indians. Imagine, therefore,
their confusion and anger that among an even greater number of rich
and powerful foreigners, primarily in Northern Europe, Alang has also
become a rallying cry for reform -- a name now synonymous with Western
complicity and Third World hell.

CAPTAIN Pandey by
daylight was less in control than he had seemed at night. He appeared
tired, even fragile. We stood on the beach among the immense steel
carcasses. I brought up the subject of the international campaign, led
by Greenpeace in Amsterdam, to reform the process of ship scrapping
worldwide. Although global in theory, the campaign in practice is
directed mostly against the biggest operation -- the beach here at
Alang. I had been told that Pandey took the campaign as a personal
attack -- and indeed, at the mention of Greenpeace he struggled
visibly to maintain his composure. His face grew tight and angry. He
spoke emphatically, as if to keep from raising his voice. Very clearly
he said, "The purposeful propaganda against this yard should be
countered. You come and look at the facts, and I'm proud of what I
have done over here. So there is nothing to hide." He sounded
secretive anyway. He implied that a cabal of shadowy forces was
conspiring against Alang, and that the real purpose of the
environmentalists' campaign was to take the shipbreaking business away
from India. He said, "I can show them ten thousand other places
outside India, point them out, which are in even worse condition than
this. Why should they talk about my country alone?"

Pandey had given his
squadron of uniformed guards strict orders to turn away any foreigners
trying to enter the yards through the main gate. But determined
foreigners kept slipping in anyway. They worked for environmental and
human-rights groups and took photographs of black smoke and red fire,
and of emaciated workers covered in oil -- strong images that, Pandey
felt, did not represent a balanced view of Alang. The moral
superiority implied by these missions was galling to many Indians,
especially here on the sacred ground of Gujarat, the birth state of
Mahatma Gandhi. Recently Greenpeace activists had painted slogans on
the side of a condemned ship. Pandey must have taken a special
pleasure in running that ship aground.

He was a complex man. He
claimed to know that he couldn't have it both ways, that he couldn't
invite the world's ships to Alang and at the same time expect to keep
the world out. Yet he insisted on trying. After the sun rose, he took
me to his office, because he wanted to stop me from wandering through
the yards, and then he escorted me away from Alang entirely, because
he wanted to make sure I was gone. I did not mention that I had
already been at Alang for more than a week, or that I knew a side road
to the site and intended to return.

Shipbreaking, American
Style

THE controversy over
Alang started on the other side of the world and a few years back, in
Baltimore, Maryland, along the ghostly industrial shoreline of the
city's outer harbor, where old highway signs warn motorists about
heavy smoke that no longer pours from the stacks. Early in 1996 a
Baltimore Sun reporter named Will Englund was out on the water when he
noticed a strange sight -- the giant aircraft carrier Coral Sea lying
partially dismantled beside a dock, "in a million pieces." Englund
looked into the situation and discovered that the Coral Sea was a
waterfront fiasco of bankruptcy, lawsuits, worker injuries, toxic
spills, and outright criminality. Of particular interest to Baltimore,
where thousands of shipyard workers had been disabled by asbestos, was
evidence of wholesale exposure once again to that dangerous dust. The
U.S. Navy, which still owned the hull, was guilty, it seemed, at least
of poor oversight. Englund's first report ran as a front-page story in
April of 1996. The Sun's chief editor, John Carroll, then decided to
go after the subject in full. He brought in his star investigative
reporter, Gary Cohn, a quick-witted man who had the sort of street
smarts that could complement Englund's more cerebral style.

The two reporters worked
on the story for more than a year. Their investigation centered on the
United States, where shipbreaking had become a nearly impossible
business, for the simple reason that the cost of scrapping a ship
correctly was higher than the value of its steel. The only reason any
remnant of the domestic industry still existed was that since 1994 all
government-owned ships -- demilitarized Navy warships and also
decrepit merchant vessels culled from the nation's mothballed "reserve
fleet" by the U.S. Maritime Administration -- had been kept out of the
overseas scrap market as a result of an Environmental Protection
Agency ban against the export of polychlorinated biphenyls, the
hazardous compounds known as PCBs, which were used in ships'
electrical and hydraulic systems. In practice, the export ban did not
apply to the much larger number of U.S.-flagged commercial vessels,
which were (and are still) exported freely for overseas salvage.
Hoping somehow to make the economics work, American scrappers bought
the government ships (or the scrapping rights) at giveaway prices,
tore into them as expediently as possible, and in most cases went
broke anyway. As a result of these defaults, the Defense Department
was forced to repossess many of the vessels that it had awarded to
U.S. contractors. Conditions in the remaining yards were universally
abysmal. The problems existed nationwide -- in California, Texas,
North Carolina, and, of course, Maryland. Englund and Cohn were
surprised by the lack of previous reporting, and they were fascinated
by the intensity of the individual stories -- of death or injury in
hot, black holds, of environmental damage, and of repeated lawbreaking
and cover-ups. Cohn especially was used to working in the underbelly
of society, but not even he had imagined that abuses on such a scale
could still exist in the United States. Later I asked him if he had
been motivated by anger or moral outrage. He mulled over the question.
"I don't know that it was so much anger. I think we discovered a lot
of things that were wrong and needed correcting. But I wouldn't say
that we walked around angry all the time." Nonetheless the subject
became their obsession.

At the same time that
Cohn and Englund were investigating the story, the Navy and the
Maritime Administration, faced with a growing backlog of rotting
hulls, were pressuring the EPA to lift its export ban. They wanted the
freedom to sell government ships for a profit on the South Asian scrap
market. Englund and Cohn realized that their investigation required a
visit to the place where many of these ships would end up if the ban
were lifted -- a faraway beach called Alang.

The Sun hired an Indian
stringer to help with logistics, enlisted a photographer, and in
February of 1997 sent the team to India. Alang was still an innocent
place: the reporters were free to go where they pleased, to take
pictures openly, and to pay no mind to Captain Pandey. The reporters
were shocked by what they saw -- to them Alang was mostly a place of
death. And they were not entirely wrong. Soon after they left Alang,
sparks from a cutting torch ignited the residual gases in a tanker's
hold and caused an explosion that killed fifteen workers -- or fifty.
Alang was the kind of place where people hardly bothered to count.

The Sun's shipbreaking
report hit the newsstands for three days in December of 1997. It
concentrated first on the Navy's failures inside the United States and
then on Alang. A little storm broke out in Washington. The Maryland
senator Barbara A. Mikulski promptly pronounced herself "appalled" and
requested a Senate investigation into the Navy's conduct. She called
simultaneously for the EPA's export ban to stay in place and for an
overhaul of the domestic program to address the labor and
environmental issues brought up by the Sun articles. Though Mikulski
spoke in stern moral terms, what she apparently also had in mind was
the creation of a new Baltimore jobs program -- involving the clean,
safe, and therefore expensive disposal of ships, to be funded in some
way by the federal government. The Navy had been embarrassed by the
Sun's report, and was in no position to counter Mikulski's attack. It
answered weakly that it welcomed discussions "to ensure [that] the
complex process of ship disposal is conducted in an environmentally
sound manner and in a way that protects the health and safety of
workers." Mikulski shot back a letter to Secretary of Defense William
Cohen: "Frankly, I was disappointed in their tepid comments. We don't
need hollow promises and clichés. We need an action plan and concrete
solutions."

Her opinion was shared by
other elected officials with struggling seaports. The Maryland
representative Wayne T. Gilchrest announced that his maritime
subcommittee would hold hearings. The California representative George
Miller said, "I feel strongly that contributing to the pollution and
labor exploitation found at places like Alang, India, is not a fitting
end for these once-proud ships." Miller also argued that since the
Navy was paying the cleanup costs at its old bases, it should pay for
the scrapping of its old ships as well. It made sense. Certainly the
U.S. government could afford it.

In the last days of 1997
the Navy surrendered, declaring that it was suspending plans to export
its ships. Reluctantly the Maritime Administration agreed to do the
same. The government had a backlog of 170 ships awaiting destruction
-- with others scheduled to join them. Faced with the continuing decay
of those ships -- and the possibility that some of them would soon
sink -- the Defense Department formed an interagency shipbreaking
panel and gave it two months to report back with recommendations. The
panel suffered from squabbling, but it dutifully went through the
motions of deliberation.

During a public hearing
in March of 1998 the speakers made just the sort of dull and
self-serving statements that one would expect. Ross Vincent, of the
Sierra Club, said, "Waste should be dealt with where it is generated."

George Miller said, "A
global environmental leader like the United States should not have as
a national policy the exporting of its toxic waste to developing
countries ill equipped to handle it."

Barbara Mikulski said,
"We ought to take a look at how we can turn this into an opportunity
for jobs in our shipyards."

And Murphy Thornton, of
the shipbuilders' union, said, "Those ships should be buried with
honor."

In April of 1998 Englund
and Cohn won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. That same
month the shipbreaking panel issued its final report -- a bland
document that reflexively called for better supervision of the
domestic industry and wistfully maintained the hope of resuming
exports, but also suggested that a Navy "pilot project" explore the
costs of clean ship disposal in the United States. By September of
last year an appropriation had moved through Congress, and the future
finally seemed clear: the pilot project included only four out of 180
ships, but it involved an initial sum of $13.3 million, to be awarded
on a "cost plus" basis to yards in Baltimore, Brownsville,
Philadelphia, and San Francisco -- and by definition it was just the
start.

This was Washington in
action. A problem had been identified and addressed through a
demonstrably open and democratic process, and a solution had been
found that was affordable and probably about right. Nonetheless, there
was also something wrong about the process -- an elusive quality not
exactly of corruption but of a repetitive and transparent dishonesty
that seemed to imply either that the public was naive or that it could
not be trusted with straight talk. Even the Baltimore Sun had joined
in: in September of 1998, when Vice President Al Gore went through the
motions of imposing another (redundant) ban on exports, an approving
Sun editorial claimed that the prohibition "especially benefits the
poorly paid and untrained workers in the wretched shipyards of South
Asia." Patently absurd assertions like that may help to explain why
shipbreaking reform, despite all the trappings of a public debate,
including coverage in the national press and even ultimately the
Pulitzer Prize, actually attracted very little attention in the United
States. The people who might naturally have spared this issue a few
moments of thought may have had little patience for the rhetoric. Or
maybe the subject just seemed too small and far away. For whatever
reason, the fact is that the American public did not notice the
linguistic nicety distinguishing the government ships in question from
the much larger number of commercial U.S.-flagged ships, which would
remain untouched by the reforms. So an argument about double
standards, which should at least have been heard, was expediently
ignored. Seen from outside the United States, the pattern was hard to
figure out. India, of course, paid attention to the controversy. At
Alang, where plenty of American commercial vessels still came to die,
people couldn't understand why the government's ships were banned. I
could never quite bridge the cultural gap to explain the logic. How
does one say that the process had simply become an exercise in
democracy from above? A subject had been tied off and contained.

Pollution's Poster
Child

TIED off and contained in
America, that is. As it turned out, the Sun's exposé did affect Alang,
but in a way that no one in Washington had anticipated. The surprise
came close on the heels of the Pulitzer Prize, when the hellish image
of Alang landed hard in Scandinavia and the countries of the Rhine,
where it ignited a popular movement for shipbreaking reform. If it
seems unlikely that ordinary people would genuinely care about a
problem so abstract and far away, nevertheless in Northern Europe
millions of them did. In The Hague a typically progressive Dutch
official explained to me that his countrymen had less-frantic lives
than Americans, and could spare the time for altruism.

The campaign, which
continues today, was led from Greenpeace's global headquarters, in
Amsterdam, by plainspoken activists who started in where American
reformers hadn't ventured -- going after the big commercial shipping
lines. By this past spring the activists had muscled their way in to
the maritime lawmaking forums and had begun to threaten the very
existence of Alang.

Their task was made
easier from the outset by the work of the emotive Brazilian
photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, who came upon the story when it was
young, in 1989, and captured unforgettable images of gaunt laborers
and broken ships on the beach in Bangladesh. In 1993 Salgado exhibited
his photographs at several shows in Europe and in his superb picture
book Workers, which was widely seen. An awareness of shipbreaking's
particular hardships began to percolate in the European consciousness,
as did the suspicion that perhaps somehow a caring West should
intervene. Then, in 1995, Greenpeace had a famous brush with marine
"salvage" when it discovered that Shell intended to dispose of a
contaminated oil-storage platform, the giant Brent Spar, by sinking it
in the North Atlantic. Greenpeace boarded the platform, led a consumer
boycott against Shell (primarily at gas stations in Germany), and with
much fanfare forced the humiliated company to back down. The Brent
Spar was towed to a Norwegian fjord and scrapped correctly, an
expensive job that continued until last summer. Greenpeace had once
again shown itself to be a powerful player on the European scene.

It was powerful because
it was popular, and popular because it was audacious, imaginative, and
incorruptible. It also had a knack for entertaining its friends. When
the drama of Alang came into clear view, Greenpeace recognized the
elements for a new campaign. The organization was not being cynical.
For many years it had been involved in a fight to stop the export of
toxic wastes from rich countries to poor -- a struggle that had
culminated in an international accord known as the Basel Ban, an
export prohibition, now in effect, to which the European Union nations
had agreed. Greenpeace considered the Basel Ban to be an important
victory, and it saw the shipbreaking trade as an obvious violation: if
the ships were not themselves toxins, they were permeated with toxic
materials, and were being sent to South Asia as a form of waste.
Greenpeace was convinced that ships owned by companies based in the
nations that had signed the accord, no matter what flag those ships
flew, were clearly banned from export. It was a good argument.
Moreover, the shipping industry's counterargument -- that the ships
went south as ships, becoming waste only after hitting the beaches --
provided a nice piece of double talk that Greenpeace could hold up for
public ridicule. And Alang, with its filth and smoke, provided perfect
panoramas to bring the point home. So Greenpeace went to war.

It was October of 1998, a
year and a half after the Sun's visit. Captain Pandey was on guard
against trouble, but he must have been looking in the wrong direction.
A group of Greenpeace activists got onto the beach by posing as
shipping buffs interested in the story of a certain German vessel.
They said they wanted the ship's wheel. But they also wandered off and
took pictures of the squalor, and they scraped up samples from the
soil, the rubble, and the shantytown shacks. After analyzing those
samples, two German laboratories quantified what Greenpeace already
knew -- that Alang was powerfully poisonous, particularly for the
laborers who worked, ate, and slept at dirt level there. Greenpeace
issued the findings in a comprehensive report, the best yet written on
Alang. The report discussed the medical consequences of the
contaminants, and described the risk of industrial accidents, which
were rumored to cause 365 deaths a year. "Every day one ship, every
day one dead," went the saying about Alang, and although the report's
authors admitted that there was no way to verify this, it was a
formulation that people remembered.

Greenpeace needed a
culprit to serve as a symbol of the European shipping business, and it
found one in the tradition-bound P&O Nedlloyd, an Anglo-Dutch cargo
line that was openly selling its old ships on the Asian scrap market.
In the shadowy world of shipping, where elusive companies establish
offshore headquarters and run their vessels under flags of
convenience, P&O Nedlloyd was a haplessly anchored target: it had a
big office building on a street in Rotterdam, and a staff of modern,
middle-class Europeans, altruists who tended to sympathize with
Greenpeace and would quietly keep it apprised of P&O Nedlloyd's
intentions and movements. Also, because a related company called P&O
Cruises operated a fleet of English Channel ferries and cruise ships,
P&O Nedlloyd was likely to be sensitive to public opinion. In November
of 1998 Greenpeace staged a protest at the company's offices, erecting
a giant photograph of a scrapped ship at Alang along with a statement
in Dutch: "P&O Nedlloyd burdens Asia with it." The press arrived, and
eventually a company director emerged from the building to talk to the
activists. He did not appear to be afraid or angry. He said it wasn't
fair to single out P&O Nedlloyd, and he made the argument that
coordinated international regulation was needed. International
regulation was exactly what Greenpeace wanted -- but when the next
day's paper came out with a photograph captioned "P&O and Greenpeace
agree," Greenpeace denied that there had been any understanding.

The truth was that
Greenpeace needed resistance from P&O Nedlloyd, and it would have had
to rethink its strategy if the company had submitted to its demands
and obediently stopped scrapping in Asia. But of course P&O Nedlloyd
did not submit -- and, for that matter, could not afford to submit.
After its brief attempt at openness, it went into just the sort of
sullen retreat that Greenpeace might have hoped for. Greenpeace staged
a series of shipside banner unfurlings, and it dogged a doomed P&O
Nedlloyd container vessel, appropriately called the Encounter Bay, as
it went about the world on its final errands. Millions of Greenpeace
sympathizers watched with glee. P&O Nedlloyd was so unnerved by the
campaign that in the spring of last year it apparently painted a new
name on a ship bound for the Indian beach, in order, perhaps, to
disguise who owned it. Greenpeace found out and shouted in
indignation. When P&O Nedlloyd then refused to comment, it began to
look like an old man turned to evil. This made for good theater --
especially against the backdrop of the ubiquitous pictures of Alang.
With public opinion now fully aroused, the Northern European
governments began to move, introducing the first dedicated
shipbreaking initiatives into the schedules of the European Union and
the International Maritime Organization -- the London-based body for
the law of the seas. In June of last year the Netherlands sponsored an
international shipbreaking conference in Amsterdam -- a meeting whose
tone was established at the outset by an emotional condemnation of the
industry by the Dutch Minister of Transport. It was obvious to
everyone there that the movement for reform was gathering strength. It
was hard to know what changes would result -- and which shipbreaking
nations would be affected. But the reformers were ambitious, and their
zeal was genuine. I thought Pandey had reason to be afraid.

IN London last fall I met
an affable Englishman named Brian Parkinson, who worked as a trade and
operations adviser for the International Chamber of Shipping, an
umbrella group of national shipowner associations. Parkinson had a
natural appreciation for the anarchy of the sea and an equally natural
aversion to the Greenpeace campaign. He said, "Shipping gets blamed
for everything. Global warming. Why the British don't have a decent
football team." For lunch we went to a dark little pub that should
have been on the docks. Parkinson told me that he was near the end of
his career and was looking forward to retirement. Meanwhile, however,
he was struggling gamely to keep pace with the times. He said, "A ship
registered in Panama, owned by a Norwegian, operating in the U.S., and
sold in India is not an export -- but we're not making that argument."
He said, "Maybe there are things that shipowners can do." First, he
had in mind a nice bit of public relations: "We're looking at creating
an inventory of hazardous components, a good-housekeeping guide. We
want to know how we can present the ship to the recyclers in the best
possible way." I complimented him on the word "recyclers," and he said
yes, right, it was rather good, wasn't it? But he was toying with
something a bit more real as well -- a proposal for voluntary
self-regulation, under which the industry would inspect and certify
the yards at the Asian beaches and then factor in good behavior when
choosing which ones to use. He mentioned that Shell had already sent
an inspector to a yard at Alang, and that he was said to have written
an in-house report. As evidence of progress, this seemed pretty slim.
I asked Parkinson what was to keep his scheme from becoming a
two-tiered arrangement, whereby a few image-conscious companies would
accept the expense of working with certified yards while all the other
shipowners continued with business as usual, selling their vessels to
the highest bidders. He said he worried about that too.

At the central train
station in Amsterdam a few days later I met Parkinson's opponent, a
leader of the Greenpeace campaign, Claire Tielens, a young Dutch woman
with a walker's stride and an absolutist's frank gaze. We went to the
station café and talked.

I asked her if she had
visited India yet, and she said no, but that for several years she had
been a reporter for an environmental news service in the Philippines,
so she knew about Third World conditions. I said, "Why did you choose
Alang? Why does it seem worse to you than the other industrial sites
in India?"

She answered, "Because
here there is a very direct link with Western companies."

"But if it's Western
companies at Alang, versus Indian companies somewhere else, what
difference does it make to the world's environment?"

"Because those Western
companies pretend to us here with glossy leaflets that they are so
environmentally responsible. And it is a shame when they export their
shit to the developing world."

"But from your
environmental point of view," I asked, "what difference does it make
who the polluter is, and whether he's a hypocrite or not? I mean, what
is it about shipbreaking? And what is it about Alang?"

I kept phrasing my
questions badly. She kept trying to answer me directly, and failing,
and going over the same ground. Without intending to, I was being
unfair. She should have said, "We needed to make some choices, and so
we chose Alang. It was easy -- and look how far we've come." I think
that would have been about right. Instead she said, "Even by Indian
standards, Alang is bad." But India has a billion people, and it is
famously difficult to define.

Dark Satanic Mills

NEW Delhi sprawls on
dirty ground under ashen skies. It is an immense capital city, a noisy
expression of the Indian democracy, not quite the anarchy that at
first it appears to be but a conglomeration of countless private
worlds. I found myself there last winter at late-night dinners and
garden parties among the city's large middle class -- professionals
who drove when they might have walked, and inhabited houses like
little forts with guarded gates and shard-topped walls. They worried
about crime -- partly, I think, because they could defend against it.
The larger assaults on a life in New Delhi were simply overwhelming. A
friend of mine with a small trucking company was concerned about the
progressive failure of the city's infrastructure and what that meant
for his business. He took me to visit New Delhi's chief urban planner,
a powerful official who sat defeated at an empty steel desk in a big
bare office, and out of boredom and loneliness detained us with small
talk and offers of tea. After we escaped, my friend said, "It's
incredible, no? I wanted you to see this. It's like he's sitting there
at the end of the world."

But to me it was the
pollution in New Delhi that seemed apocalyptic. The streams were dead
channels trickling with sewage and bright chemicals, and the air on
the streets was at times barely breathable. In the heat of the
afternoons a yellow-white mixture hung above the city, raining acidic
soot into the dust and exhaust fumes. At night the mixture condensed
into a dry, choking fog that enveloped the headlights of passing cars,
and crept with its stink into even the tightest houses. The residents
could do little to keep the poison out of their lungs or the lungs of
their children, and if they were poor, they could not even try. People
told me it was taking years off their lives. Yet New Delhi was
bursting its seams, because newcomers from rural India kept flooding
in.

The big port city of
Bombay has a reputation for being just as dirty, but on the day I got
there, an ocean breeze was blowing, and in relative terms the air was
clean. When I mentioned this to Pravin S. Nagarsheth, the shipbreaker
I had come to see, he grew excited and said, "Yeah! Yeah!" because
relativity was precisely the point he wanted to make to me. Nagarsheth
was a nervous little man with a round and splotchy face and some
missing teeth. He had been scrapping ships for nearly thirty-five
years, first with a small yard here in Bombay, and then in a bigger
way at Alang. He was also the president of the Indian shipbreakers'
association, and as such he had taken the lead in the industry's
defense. He had traveled to the Amsterdam shipbreaking conference to
counter the reports of abuses at Alang. In his speech there he said,
"All these write-ups, I would say, are biased, full of
exaggerations.... One, however, wonders whether such reports are
deliberately written for public consumption in affluent Western
societies only.... The environmentalists and Greenpeace talk of future
generations, but are least bothered about the plight of the present
generation. Have they contributed anything constructive to mitigate
the plight of the people living below the poverty line in developing
countries? ... Living conditions of labor in Alang should not be
looked at in isolation. It is the crisis of urbanization due to job
scarcity. Large-scale slums have mushroomed in all cities.... The fact
remains that workers at Alang are better paid and are probably safer
than their counterparts back in the poor provinces of Orissa, Bihar,
and Uttar Pradesh. To provide housing and better living conditions ...
is financially impractical for a developing country like India, where
forty-five percent of the population is living below the poverty
line."

We met in the lobby of a
shabby hotel in central Bombay. Nagarsheth kept leaning into me,
grabbing my arm to punctuate his arguments. He said, "Everybody knows
this is bad! It is not a point of dispute! What Greenpeace is saying
is even excellent! But their ideology does not provide solutions! This
generation cannot afford it!"

Nagarsheth seemed to
worry that I would understand the country in some antiseptic way --
for its computer industry, its novelists, or maybe even its military
might. But the India he wanted me to see was a place that related
directly to Alang -- an India drowning in the poverty of its people.
And so, rather than talking any more about shipbreaking, he insisted
on showing me around Bombay. He guided me into the city's slums, which
are said to be the largest in the world. Then he led me back toward
the city center, for miles through a roadside hell where peasants
lived wall-to-wall in scrap boxes and shacks, and naked children sat
listless in the traffic's blue smoke as if waiting to die. Nagarsheth
said, "Do you see this? Do you see this? You need to remember it when
you get to Alang."

He was making a valid
point about relative levels of misery. I saw another level a few days
later in Bhavnagar, the nearest city to Alang, at a re-rolling mill,
where hull plates from the ships were being torch cut, heated, and
stretched into reinforcing bars. Bhavnagar is an uncrowded city by
Indian standards, with a population of perhaps 600,000 in a physical
shell that to a Westerner might seem better suited for perhaps a
fourth of that. The re-rolling mill I visited was one of many there.
It stood on the north edge of town, on a quiet dirt street wandered by
cows, at the end of a crumbling brick wall, beyond the dust and din of
the city's auto-rickshaws. The mill had a sagging iron gate. A
traveler would normally pass it by, perhaps seeing it as a poor but
peaceful scene. But I went inside, past an old brick building where
clerks sat idle behind bulky typewriters on an outside porch, and on
into the dark heart of the mill -- a large, open-sided shed where
perhaps a hundred emaciated men moved through soot and heavy smoke,
feeding scrap to a roaring furnace leaking flames from cracks in the
side. The noise in there was deafening. The heat was so intense that
in places I thought it might sear my lungs. The workers' clothes were
black with carbon, as were their hair and their skin. Their faces were
so sooty that their eyes seemed illuminated.

The furnace was long and
low. The men working closest to the fire tried to protect themselves
by wrapping heavy rags around their mouths and legs. They cut the
steel plates into heavy strips, which they heaved into the inferno and
dragged through the furnace before wrestling them free, red-hot, at
the far end. Using long tongs, they slung the smoking metal, still
brightly glowing, through a graduated series of rollers, which
squeezed and lengthened it incrementally into the final product -- the
reinforcing rods, which were piled together and allowed to cool. It
was a punishing and dangerous procedure, requiring agility, strength,
and speed, and also the calculation of risk. The workers were quite
obviously exhausted by it. Some, I think, were slowly starving,
trapped in that cycle of nutritional deficit all too common in South
Asia, by which a man may gradually expend more calories on his job
than his wages will allow him to replace.

On the Beach

I TRAVELED from Bhavnagar
to Alang, thirty miles to the south, on a narrow road crowded with
jitneys and trucks, choked with blue exhaust, and battered by the
weight of steel scrap. The road ran like an industrial artery across
plains of denuded farmland, on which impoverished villages endured in
torpor and peasants scratched at the parched earth. Along the way
stood a few open-air cafés, where truck drivers could stop for soft
drinks and food, and a few small factories, where oxygen was
concentrated into steel bottles to be mixed later with cooking gas for
use in the cutting operations farther south. But otherwise the
roadside scenery remained agricultural until several miles before
Alang. There, next to a small house on the right, a collection of
lifeboats listed in the dirt. The lifeboats marked the start of
Alang's roadside marketplace, where specialized traders neatly sorted
and resold secondary merchandise from the ships. There were yards for
generators, motors, transformers, kitchen appliances, beds and other
furniture, wires and pipes, cables, ropes, life rings, clothing,
industrial fluids, and miscellaneous machinery. The traders lived
among their goods. The buyers came from all over India.

The marketplace continued
for several miles to Alang's main gate. But the best way to the beach
for a Westerner, given Captain Pandey's concerns about foreigners, was
a small side road that branched off a few miles before the main gate
and wandered again through rural scenery. I passed a boy herding cows,
three women carrying water, a turbaned farmer hoeing. The heat was
oppressive. The air smelled of dung and dust. For a while it was
almost possible to forget that the ocean was near. But then the road
made a turn, and at the far end of a field an immense cargo ship rose
above the trees. Behind it, fainter and in the haze, stood another.
The ships seemed to emerge from the earth, as if the peasants had
found a way to farm them.

My base at the beach was
Plot 138. It was a busy patch of ground, bounded at the top by one of
the standard sheet-metal fences. I threaded through piles of sorted
scrap, past the smoke of cutting crews, past chanting gangs carrying
heavy steel plate, past cables and chains and roaring diesel winches,
to the water's edge, where the hulk of a 466-foot Japanese-built cargo
ship called the Sun Ray, once registered in the Maldives, was being
torn apart by an army of the poor. Four hundred men worked there,
divided into three distinct groups -- a shipboard elite of cutters and
their assistants, who were slicing the hull into multi-ton pieces; a
ground crew of less experienced men, who winched those pieces partway
up the beach and reduced them there to ten-foot sections of steel
plate; and, finally, the masses of unskilled porters condemned to the
end of the production line, where, piece by piece, they would
eventually shoulder the entire weight of the hull, lugging the heavy
plates to the upper beach and loading them into trucks -- belching
monsters painted like Hindu shrines -- which would haul the scrap
away. And that was just for the steel. Everywhere I looked stood the
piles of secondary products awaiting disposal -- the barrels of oil
and hydraulic fluid and all the assorted equipment destined for the
roadside marketplace. In either direction I could look down the coast
at a line of torn ships fading into the smoke of burning oil.

Alang at first is a scene
of complete visual confusion; it begins to make sense only after about
a week, when the visual impact fades, and the process of breaking a
ship by hand sorts itself out into a series of simple, brutal
activities. The first job is to shackle the ship more firmly to the
ground. Using motorized winches and a combination of anchor chains and
braided steel cables looped through holes cut into the bow, the
workers draw the hull as high onto the beach as the ship's draft and
trim allow, so that ideally the bow stands on dry ground even at high
tide. The winches are diesel-powered machines each the size of a small
bulldozer, staked firmly to the ground about halfway up the beach. The
stress on the cables during the winching operation is enormous. They
groan and clank under the load, and sometimes they snap dangerously.
The workers are ordered to stand clear. Nonetheless, some winch
operators sit unprotected by safety cages, and gamble that a broken
cable will never recoil directly back at them. It's easy to imagine
that sometimes they lose.

After the initial
dragging is done, the crews climb aboard with ladders and ropes and
begin to empty the ship's fuel tanks: they pump the good oil into
barrels for resale, and slop the residual sludge of no commercial
value onto dry ground, where it is burned. The empty tanks continue to
produce volatile vapors, and pose a risk of explosion until they are
aerated -- a tricky process that often involves cutting ventilation
holes. The most experienced cutters are used for this work, because
they are believed to have developed noses for dangerous vapors. Even
so, there are explosions and fatalities -- though fewer now than
before, because of slowly improving safety standards. On some ships
the tanks can be sliced off whole, dropped into the water, and winched
above the tide line for dissection and disposal. Cutting on hard
ground is easier than cutting on the ship, and because the workers are
therefore more likely to do the job right, it is also safer. But
either way, the yard must demonstrate to Gujarat officials that the
fuel tanks have been secured and neutralized before they will give the
final authorization to proceed with the scrapping.

With the risk of
explosion diminished, the breakers turn their attention to the ship's
superstructure, the thin-walled quarters that typically rise five or
six levels above the main deck, and in which, because of combustible
wiring and wood paneling, the chance of a deadly fire cannot be
ignored. The superstructure is like a ghost town, still full of the
traces of its former inhabitants. Scattered about lie old books and
magazines in various languages, nautical charts from faraway oceans,
company manuals, years' worth of ship's logs, newspaper clippings,
national flags, signal flags, radio frequency lists, union pamphlets,
letters, clothes, posters, and sometimes a much-appreciated stock of
liquor, narcotics, or pornography. The scrappers spread through the
quarters like hungry scavengers, quickly removing the furniture and
galley equipment, tearing into the wood paneling and asbestos
insulation to get at the valuable plumbing, stripping out the wires,
electronics, and instruments, and making a special effort to save the
ship's bell, always in demand for use at Hindu temples. These
treasures are roped down the side and hustled to the top of the beach
by ground crews.

Then the cutting begins.
It is surprising how few men are needed to handle the torches: by
working simultaneously on the port and starboard sides, a dozen
competent cutters, backed up by a larger number of assistants, can
demolish an entire superstructure within two weeks. Gravity helps.
Starting with the overhanging wings of the bridge, the cutters slice
the superstructure into big sections. There is an art to this, because
every ship is different. The decisions about where to cut are made by
the yard's owner and the all-important shipboard supervisor. Within
the logical demolition sequence (which with variations runs roughly
from front to back and from top to bottom) the general idea is to cut
off the largest section that can be cleared away from the ship by the
shore-based winches. The height and geometry of the superstructure is
a crucial consideration, because it affects the way the sections fall.
If the work has been done right, when the final cut on a section is
made, it falls clear of the hull. It lands on the tidal flat with a
dull thump. The ground crew walks out to it, attaches a cable, and
winches it higher onto the beach to carve it up. Meanwhile, the
shipboard crews may already have dropped another section. At this
early stage it can be gratifying work. If the superstructure is
flimsy, the crews can make the metal rain.

But the work slows when
they come to the hull, where the steel is heavier and harder to cut.
At that point, even for veteran workers, there must be a moment of
hesitation at the audacity of the business. Using little more than
cooking gas and muscle power they will tear apart this immense
monolith, which towers above the crowds on the sand. It will take six
months or a year to finish the job; men will be injured, and some may
die. Almost all will to some degree be poisoned by smoke and toxic
substances -- and more seriously, no doubt, than they would have been
on the streets of India's cities. Nonetheless, the poor cannot afford
to be timid.

They go after the hull by
cutting off the forward section of the bow, opening the ship's
cavernous forward hold to the outside, and making room for an expanded
force of shipboard cutting crews. Half of them continue to cut at the
forward section, slowly moving aft; the other half burrow directly
back through the ship, cutting away the internal bulkheads, until they
come to the engine room, near the stern. The ship's engine is not
usually saved, because generally it is worn out, and in any case it is
often too large to be removed whole. The crews open ventilation holes
through the sides of the hull, unbolt the engine, disconnect it from
the shafts, and cut it apart crudely on the spot. They drag the pieces
forward through the length of the ship with the help of small winches
placed aboard for that purpose.

To understand why it is
important to remove the engine early in the process, consider that the
ship continues in part to float throughout the scrapping process, and
that high tides lift it, allowing the progressive winchings by which,
as the hull is consumed, it is drawn onto the beach. From the start
the ship's trim is a consideration. If the angle at which the keel is
floating does not match the slope of the ocean floor, the ship may
hang up offshore. The trick is not to get the bow to ride high, as one
might assume, but, rather, to keep the stern of an unladen ship from
riding too low. The stern naturally rides low because of the weight of
the superstructure, the engine, and the machinery installed there.
Once the scrapping is under way, the correct trim can be maintained
only by the judicious removal of weight. Cutting away the
superstructure and removing the heavy bronze propeller does not fully
compensate for the subsequent loss of the bow section, whose weight,
because it lies so far forward of the ship's center of gravity, has a
disproportionate effect on the trim. That is why the breakers must go
in from the opened bow and take out the engine. Afterward the
demolition proceeds so predictably, from bow to stern, that it is
possible to mark its conclusion precisely when the ship's rudder lies
at last on dry ground, submitting to the torches. The workers do not
celebrate the achievement, because if they are lucky, the next ship
has already arrived.

Plot 138, the yard that I
settled into, was the domain of Paras Ship Breakers Ltd., a company
owned by a man named Chiman Bai, who began his career as an errand boy
in the ancient Bhavnagar market and rose to become a shopkeeper
selling rice and wheat. Bai got into the shipbreaking business in
1983, when he responded to an obscure notice in the newspaper about
the availability of plots at Alang. I never met him, I think because
he felt awkward with foreigners; it was said that he still worked from
a back office in the market and that he presided over an extended
family of thirty-five, all of whom lived in a single house in
Bhavnagar and ate their meals together in the traditional way, sitting
on the kitchen floor. His younger brother, Jaysukh Bai, ran the
shipbreaking operation day to day. He was a square-jawed, gray-haired
man with a Hindu cloth bracelet and a diamond ring. He did business at
an office in Bhavnagar every morning, and in the afternoon made his
way to Alang, where he sat among his sons and nephews on a porch
overlooking the yard. I sat with him sometimes, drinking the Indian
cola called Thumbs Up, breathing the acrid smoke from the final
cutting of ship parts, some of which was done nearby. Jaysukh Bai did
not seem to notice the smoke. One of his nephews figured that I did.
He distrusted me, and repeatedly made that clear. Once he said
nastily, "The question I want to ask the environmentalists is if you
should want to die first of starvation or pollution."

I said, "They say you
don't have to make that choice."

He said, "That's
bullshit."

In a place like Alang, he
was probably right.

Sometimes I wandered
across the road, into the crowded shantytown where the workers lived,
a place with shacks built of wood and ship's paneling, some on stilts
over a malarial marsh that bordered the beach. There were no latrines
at Alang, in part because few of the men would have used them. They
preferred simply to relieve themselves in nearby bushes, as they had
in the farming hamlets from which they came. But of course Alang was
much larger than a hamlet, and as a result the air there was filled
with fecal odors, which mixed with the waves of smoke and industrial
dust to permeate the settlement with a potent stench. People got used
to it, as they did to the mosquitoes, and the flies. Discomfort was an
accepted part of living in Alang, as was disease. Thousands of workers
who were sick, injured, or unemployed lingered in the shantytown
during the day, lying on scavenged linoleum floors by open doorways,
or sitting outside in the thin shade of the walls. There were almost
no wives or children. As in other migrant camps, drunkenness,
prostitution, and violence were never far away.

Nonetheless, a semblance
of normalcy was maintained. For instance, Alang had a good
drinking-water system, a network of communal cisterns supplied by
truck, which was Captain Pandey's pride. It also had Hindu shrines,
informal cricket fields, and enough spare power for its commercial
district to run refrigerators and gay little strings of lights. Each
evening when the workday was done, the settlement came to life. The
workers cooked outside their shacks in small groups intent on the
food, and afterward, feeling renewed, they gathered in the light from
the cafés and talked. They laughed. They listened to music. Sometimes
they held religious processions. Sometimes they danced. And then on
Sundays, when by law all the shipbreaking yards were closed, they
washed, dressed up, and strolled among friends, looking fresh and
clean-cut.

One evening a small group
from Plot 138 invited me to sit with them outside their shack, and one
of them went off into the slum and came back with a man who could
translate. It was awkward for everyone. The men were formal with me. I
asked about their work. They knew it was risky and could make them
sick, but they seemed more interested in letting me know they were
cutters, and stood high on the scrapyard scale. I asked about their
bosses, and they named some of the supervisors who had given them
jobs. They said that in other yards some of the supervisors were
abusive. They offered no opinions about Jaysukh Bai, maybe because
they had seen me with him.

After a week Pravin
Nagarsheth arrived from Bombay to check on his shipyard, a few plots
down from Plot 138. A ship lay there half consumed on the beach.
Nagarsheth brought his son-in-law with him, a slim city boy in
undersized Ray-Bans who slipped carefully around the workers and
confided to me, "The first time I came here, I was totally zapped." He
meant he was surprised. He seemed a bit precious. But Nagarsheth was
not like that, and neither was Jaysukh Bai. They were direct men who
walked willingly among their laborers; and though they had grown
wealthy on the backs of the poor, they had maintained a connection to
them nonetheless. The alternative seemed to be the disengagement I had
witnessed in New Delhi and Bombay, where the upper levels of society
were floating free of the ground, aided by the airlines and the
Internet, as if the poverty in India were a geographic inconvenience.
Nagarsheth's own daughter had graduated from the University of Chicago
with a degree in computer science, and he was proud of her. But
standing beside him on the beach, in the midst of his piles of scrap,
I suspected he knew that shipbreakers were unfashionable among the
Indian elites. He may even have been able to see himself as they did
-- an angry little man with a propensity for mucking around in the
world's garbage. In the foreign press I had discerned an undertone of
mockery about such things, a vestige of the old colonial amusement at
the very idea of native kings. Even the Baltimore Sun had indulged in
the fun, quoting an interior decorator from Bombay who ridiculed the
flamboyant tastes on exhibit in the shipbreakers' big houses in
Bhavnagar. Such public amusement was of course noticed elsewhere in
India, especially among the ruling classes, who were so successfully
joining the "global" (meaning Westernized) society. Now, in Bombay and
New Delhi, a young and soon to be powerful generation was returning
from European and American universities speaking the language of
environmentalism. And Alang was becoming an embarrassment.

The Future of Alang

ALANG has become a
metaphor in the crucial struggle of our time -- that between the First
World and the Third, the rich and the poor. Beneath our perspectives
on a shrinking world lurks an opposing reality, hidden in the poverty
of places like South Asia, of a world that is becoming larger -- and
unmanageably so. Do we share a global ecology? On a certain level it's
obvious that we do, and that therefore, at last, a genuine scientific
argument can be made for the imposition of Western knowledge. But
making this argument is difficult, full of political risk and the
opportunity for self-delusion. In practice, the world is as much a
human construct as a natural one. The people who inhabit it have such
radically different experiences in life that it can be almost
surprising that they share the same air. This is inherently hard to
accept from a distance. Too often we have a view of what is desirable
for some other part of the world which is so detached from daily
existence there that it becomes counterproductive, or even inhumane.
Alang is a typical case. Resentful Indians kept saying to me, "You had
your industrial revolution, and so we should have ours." I kept
suggesting in return that history is not so symmetrical. But of course
they knew that already, and viewed Alang with more complexity than
they could express to me, and were using a simplified argument they
felt I might understand. On the ship-scrapping beach at Chittagong, in
Bangladesh, I met an angry man who took the simplest approach. He
said, "You are sitting on top of the World Trade Center, sniffing
fresh air, and talking about it. You don't know anything."

He was angry about the
West's presumptuousness and its strength. He was angry about people
like Claire Tielens, at Greenpeace. When I talked to Tielens in
Amsterdam, she was unyielding about Greenpeace's demands. She said,
"Ships should not be scrapped in Asia unless they are decontaminated
and they don't contain toxic materials. New ships should be built in
such a way that they can be scrapped safely -- so without hazardous
materials if possible. The export of toxin-containing ships from
Western countries to developing countries should be stopped. And if
possible, ships should be cleaned throughout their lifetime. If they
export clean steel, that's fine with us."

I said, "But ships will
always contain toxic wastes. Is it economically possible to ..."

"'Economically'? Well, of
course that's a very flexible term."

I thought the economics
might be less flexible than she believed. One of the twists in this
story is that the U.S. government, an entity that Greenpeace has a
prerogative to dislike, has become without question the world's most
principled shipowner, and as such is leading the way in establishing
the real costs of doing things right. I spent an afternoon last winter
at an anchorage run by the Maritime Administration on the James River
in Virginia, climbing through floating wrecks among the ever-growing
number of government derelicts awaiting a proper domestic disposal. On
one ship a workman had painted SINK ME! as a way of tempting fate. All
these ships were rusting through. The annual costs for routine
monitoring, pumping, and patching amounted to an average of about
$20,000 per vessel. That may not seem like much, but many of the hulls
were in such poor condition that to keep them from sinking, they would
soon have to be dry-docked for million-dollar repairs -- only to be
towed back to their moorings to continue rusting. The ships could now
be bought for a mere $10 each, but even at that price there were no
takers. At the Maritime Administration's headquarters in Washington,
D.C., people recognized the absurdity of the situation and could laugh
about it. All they could do was hope for congressional funding to pay
for the scrapping of the ships.

Meanwhile, the Navy was
proceeding with its four-ship, $13.3 million pilot project. Dockside
at Baltimore Marine Industries the next day I visited a small frigate
named the Patterson that was being meticulously dismantled by a crew
of fifty-four specialists working under the close supervision of a
former Navy diver, who informed me, when I asked about the schedule
and cost, that safety and a clean environment were his main concerns.
His ship had space-suited workers, positive-pressure filtered
ventilation, sealed hazardous-materials bins, color-coded placards,
and micron socks hanging from the scuppers to purify the rainwater
that drained from its immaculate decks. I realized I was in the
presence of a shipbreaking pioneer. He understood the ethical need to
spend millions more on a useless ship than its steel was worth. He
consulted with chemists, liaison people, and all sorts of engineers.
He shared information openly with his competitors, and expected them
to do the same. He enforced a wide range of regulations, and fairly.
He worked well with unions. He even took time to respect the memory of
the Patterson's sailors. His shipbreaking mission was so righteous it
was practically Calvinistic.

That was true of
Greenpeace's mission too. But there was a strange reversal. The U.S.
Navy for once was concentrating on its own local problem, while
Greenpeace was insisting that it had a mandate from "the global
society" and "citizens of this planet." Words like those can come
across as direct threats of conquest -- all the more so in weak and
uncertain places like the impoverished parts of India that are already
suffering from the disengagement of the elites.

I don't think Claire
Tielens worried about such sensitivities. She told me that she had
chosen her path because she wanted to fight injustice. She was a true
idealist. But she did not feel reluctant to say "The recycling of
toxic waste is such a hazardous activity that you cannot leave it to a
developing country to do that. People say 'Why don't we export our
knowledge and technology, and they can improve their conditions, and
everything will be fine.' But nothing will be fine, because it's not
just a matter of know-how and technology. Because to successfully
export our environmental knowledge to India, you would also have to
export the whole way society is organized." She was right about that,
of course. But whereas others might hesitate over the implications of
such ideas, she was not about to question the Greenpeace crusade. Her
terms were unconditional: if she had her way, India would have to
lose.

WHAT Greenpeace wants
from shipbreaking must seem in the tidy confines of Holland to be
perfectly fair -- essentially, to treat shipping as if it were any
other orderly industry, and to hold it responsible for its toxic
by-products and the safety of its workers. The problem is that
shipping is like the larger world in which it operates -- an
inherently disorderly affair, existing mostly beyond the reach of
nations and their laws, beyond the dikes and coastal horizons, and out
across the open seas. It is not exactly a criminal industry, but it is
an amoral and stubbornly anarchic one. And it admits as much about
itself: at last June's shipbreaking conference in Amsterdam one of the
all-important London-based maritime insurers raised the fear that if
somehow the reforms go through, even assuming they apply only to the
most visible European shippers, there will be a corresponding increase
in mysterious sinkings.

But others in the
business told me that the more likely effect of the reforms, as long
as money can be made in Third World scrap, would simply be a new and
less direct route to Asia: ships would pass through more hands, would
maybe live longer plying faraway waters under new names and flags, and
would still end up dying on some filthy beach. Such changes are
already happening, though it will be a year or more before
Greenpeace's campaign results in any new laws in the European Union
and at the International Maritime Organization. There is evidence that
some European shippers have begun to find new foreign buyers for
vessels that they would normally have sold directly to scrappers, and
Shell has recently decided to re-inspect and retain certain aging
tankers rather than face the wrath of Greenpeace again. Paradoxically,
such policies may lead to an increase in hull failures and spills --
currently a big problem on the oceans. The lovely coast of Brittany
will suffer for many years because of the loss of the Erika -- a
decrepit Maltese-registered tanker, overdue for scrapping, that broke
in two off Brest last winter. Greenpeace protested the lax enforcement
of European port controls -- to good effect. But on the scale of the
world, shipping is terribly difficult to police.

Few observers seriously
believe that as a result of Western pressures, South Asia as a whole
will now lose the scrapping business. But this offers little solace to
the scrappers at Alang, because there is serious competition within
the region, especially from Bangladesh. At Chittagong starvation wages
are paid and labor and safety regulations are utterly lacking, so a
shipbreaker can send a thousand barefoot men to tear apart a single
vessel and scrap even a supertanker in six months. Bangladesh is not
so much a nation as a condition of distress, and any attempt to
regulate the industry there would obviously be futile. As a result of
this commercial advantage, the Bangladeshis can pay top dollar for
ships. During my stay at Alang such international competition had
forced the bidding level for scrap ships above the price necessary to
break even within India, and the scrappers currently acquiring vessels
were having to gamble on a significant rise in the Indian metal
market. It was a dangerous time.

Pravin Nagarsheth was not
sanguine about Alang's prospects. He worried that the Indian beach had
been singled out for special criticism, and that the publicity of the
Greenpeace campaign was exacerbating the existing competitive
pressures. There was evidence, he said, that some of the biggest
shippers had begun quietly to shy away from India entirely, and to
direct their ships to more discreet beaches. He worried also about the
process within India whereby the European campaign seemed to be
changing domestic attitudes toward Alang -- a change that in the end
may prove more threatening to the work there than the eventual
enactment of foreign laws. Either way, Nagarsheth wanted me to know
how little it would take to destroy Alang.

Jaysukh Bai, the boss of
Plot 138, was a relief to me, because he seemed almost unaware that
his work might be considered wrong. He was a simple man, who knew the
mechanics of the trade. As if I might not have heard, he said, "There
are certain Western lobbies who are interested that shipbreaking not
continue." But he never once mentioned any concern for safety or the
environment. He never once mentioned his workers. He said, "I am
worried about the future. What is important is the turnaround time. If
there are too many rules to comply with, we will waste time." It was a
statement of fact, hard to argue with. I asked him how many ships he
had broken. He counted on his fingers, because he remembered every
one. Eventually he answered: thirty-eight. He told me they included
the biggest ship ever grounded at Alang, a French supertanker of
52,000 tons. Those were the good old days. With that ship Captain
Pandey must have had great fun.

The one here now, the old
Sun Ray from the Maldives, was only 15,000 tons, but it seemed very
big to me. Jaysukh Bai told me he could do the job on it, start to
finish, in a mere four months. That was very fast, and he may have
been bragging. But only one month into it the superstructure and fuel
tanks had been cut up and hauled away, and the lightened hull was
being winched forward on the high tides and consumed with voracious
efficiency. Even the birds joined in, pecking through the debris along
the waterline, as alert as any man on the shore to the shreds of
opportunity -- a shard of torn plywood, pieces of wire for nest
building, splinters of steel. I went down to the ship when I could,
past the ground crews who by now had grown used to my presence. At the
torn bow I climbed through the broken bilge into the huge forward
cargo hold, now open to the sky. The ship was mine to wander -- up
precarious ladders to the main deck high above, through passageways
and equipment rooms where the peeling paint and rusted steel gave
evidence of the years of wandering and hard use, and ultimately of
neglect. Nonetheless, I felt a sort of awe, and was never in a hurry
to leave. After climbing back down from the main deck into the hold, I
sometimes walked deeper still into the depths of the ship. It was
eerie and dim on the inside, an immense man-made cavern filled with
hoarse warning cries, the hiss of torches, sparks, smoke, heavy
hammering, the sound of falling debris. It had paths made of narrow
beams with oil-slick footing, and sudden gaping holes that seemed to
emerge out of nowhere. If you fell there, you could certainly die. But
after the glare and heat outside, it was also pleasantly cool. The
workers did not seem to mind my presence, or even to wonder about it.
They appeared sometimes like ghosts, moving fast and in file without
speaking. They were very dirty. They were very poor. But they lacked
the look of death that I had seen on the men in the Bhavnagar
re-rolling mill. They were purposeful. Toward the stern, where
sunlight streamed through rough-cut ventilation holes and struck the
oil-blackened walls, the towering engine room had the Gothic beauty of
a cathedral.

William Langewiesche is a
correspondent for The Atlantic. He is the author of Sahara Unveiled: A
Journey Across the Desert (1996) and Inside the Sky: A Meditation on
Flight (1998).

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